Master violin spiccato at any speed

Hi, I'm Nathan Cole of natesviolin.com and today we're going to look at the relationship between height and speed in the staccato bow stroke.

All right, so that's just a little demo of going from very slow to very fast spiccato. And I do that by changing the height of the stroke.

Now, in order to master spiccato you have to have all of those speeds ready at a moment's notice
so that you can use them whenever they come up in pieces. And that can be frustrating, I know, to a lot of violinists because either you feel like you only have one good speed for your spiccato; or perhaps you've just gotten so tied up and frustrated with the whole thing, that you forget you even have one good speed!

Now the fact is that just about anyone can play a spiccato if they're letting the bow fall onto the string like this. Now that may not be the world's best sound, but the bow is just falling onto the string. It's rebounding, really. The fact is that the bow is designed to bounce, and like every other object on Earth it's really designed to fall. So thank you to gravity! Let's actually demystify spiccato a little bit, and let's compare it to something we see all the time: the bouncing of a ball.

So you saw that as the ball bounced slower, the bounces also got faster. I know that's not going to be a surprise to anybody who's ever seen the ball bounce before! But that really is the simple rule to understand: the relationship to understand with the spiccato stroke. The speed, or the tempo, of the spiccato is going to determine how high your bounce is. Faster tempo, lower bounce. So let's go back to that opening demo that i did and take a closer look:

So you saw that just as with the bouncing ball, the bow bounced lower as the spiccato got faster. And that's not true just for us as violinists! Let's take a trip far, far away... to the Hollywood Bowl where we're going to visit with the Principal Timpanist of the LA Phil, Joe Pereira, and he's going to show us that the exact same thing is true for percussion as well. So, away to the Hollywood Bowl we go!

All right, thank you Joe Pereira! I love when someone else makes my point for me, and on a different instrument! So how can you start to master spiccato in all the different speeds?

1. Get a metronome or perhaps an app on a smartphone. Keep it off for now.
2. Find one comfortable speed for spiccato, where your bow is just rebounding.
3. Turn on the metronome to find what speed that corresponds to, and write that number down. That’s your default.
(If you’re having trouble finding any good speed, check your contact point)
4. Turn off the metronome and try a slightly lower bounce than your default.
5. Turn the metronome back on and write down the new (faster) speed that corresponds to the lower bounce.
6. Repeat with both lower and higher bounces so that you have a range of speeds written down.
7. Pick one of those speeds, turn on the metronome, and practice starting your spiccato exactly at that speed.

One more tip: if you're having a hard time changing these speeds, for some folks it's helpful to think of spiccato as simply a normal detaché stroke above the string.

Now one final word: this height and speed thing, its relative, right? It's not absolute. Different players, different bows, and different types of spiccato sound... they all use different heights. So the exact height for you is not going to be the exact height for someone else. And as I said, the type of spiccato sound can change those variables too. For example, more aggressive spiccato is just going to be higher. It's going to be a higher bounce. But for any kind of spiccato sound, the height is always going to be relative to the speed.

Next, go to natesviolin.com. You can even click the little information link in this video! Download my practice guide because that will show you how to pick up all kinds of new skills and incorporate them in your practicing... and have them stick from day to day. So as always, see you next time at natesviolin.com!

Видео Master violin spiccato at any speed канала Nathan Cole